SHARE

Monday, March 18, 2013

Announcing the New Biodiversity Heritage Library!

The Homepage of the New BHL! Click image to enlarge.

Today the Biodiversity Heritage Library released a new user interface, including an updated website design, improved book navigation, and article-level access to collections. The new interface was informed by usability studies and is based on the design and functionality of the BHL-Australia portal.

Current Improvements Include:

Updated Design: The website's design has been upgraded to reflect the celebrated aesthetics of the BHL-Australia portal.

Article and Chapter Access: The ability to search BHL by article or chapter titles has been implemented. To date, over 81,000 articles and chapters have been indexed and are searchable within BHL. Additional articles and chapters will become available as the collections continue to be indexed.

Open Data Enhancements: BHL's APIs, OpenURL interface, and Data Exports have been modified to include available article and chapter information.

Book Viewer Updates: The BHL book viewer has been updated, allowing users to view multiple columns of pages on screen at once and more easily navigate to a specific page within a book. Users can also view OCR text alongside page images, and, where the books have been indexed, users can navigate directly to the articles or chapters within using a new Table of Contents feature.

New and Improved BHL Book Viewer, with option to view multiple columns
of pages at once and view OCR text alongside page images. Select books
also have a Table of Contents feature which displays the
articles/chapters identified within the text, with the ability for users
to click on each to navigate directly to the corresponding part. Click image to enlarge.

Upcoming Improvements Include:

Improved Taxon Name Finding Algorithms: BHL will soon implement a new algorithm capable of identifying previously undiscovered taxon names throughout the BHL corpus. Test applications of this algorithm have already resulted in an increase of nearly 50 million names instances in BHL, translating to over 20 million unique names identified. These newly-identified names are currently available in BHL.

We'd like to send a special thanks to everyone who made the new BHL possible. To start, thanks to the BHL-Australia team for their contributions to the process. First, to those who designed and developed the original BHL-Australia portal on which our new website is based, we thank Simon O'Shea (Designer) and Michael Mason (Developer). Secondly, to the BHL-Australia staff that worked with the US staff to merge the two UIs, we thank Simon Sherrin and Ajay Ranipeta (Developers) and Simone Downey (Designer - design based on original design by Simon O'Shea). And finally, a special thanks to Ely Wallis, BHL-Australia Director and Chair of the Global BHL Executive Committee, who selflessly supported the dedication of her staff's time to this process.

Thirdly, we would like to thank everyone who helped alpha and beta test the new site to ensure that our users' experience would be the best that it could possibly be. Specifically, thanks to Rod Page, Pat LaFollette, and Francisco Welter-Schultes, BHL superstar users, for the valuable user-perspective input they provided.

Finally, we'd like to give a standing ovation to BHL's Lead Developer, Mike Lichtenberg (Missouri Botanical Garden), who has dedicated countless hours over the past year to creating, with the support of all mentioned above, the new Biodiversity Heritage Library!

Big News Across the Pond: Launching BHL-Europe

Coinciding with the launch of our new portal, the BHL-Europe portal is also officially launching today. Providing access to material scanned from 92 content providers in Europe and the United States (including a subset of the BHL-US/UK corpus), the BHL-Europe collection currently comprises over 6,000 items, constituting over 1 million pages, of open access biodiversity literature, with more content being added daily. BHL-Europe’s content is also available through the Europeana portal. And, while you’re exploring BHL-Europe, be sure to check out Biodiversity Library Exhibitions (BLE), online exhibitions from BHL-Europe featuring books, images, stories and factoids about such topics as expeditions, spices, and poisonous nature.

Sorry to hear you're having trouble with slowness. We are aware that slowness has been an issue since the new site launched last Monday, likely on account of the record traffic we received. We are looking into the issue further to return the site to its expected speed as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience.

About BHL

The Biodiversity Heritage Library is a consortium of major natural history, botanical, and research libraries that cooperate to digitize and make accessible the literature of biodiversity held in their collections as a part of a global "biodiversity commons."Learn more. Terms of Use: http://www.si.edu/Termsofuse

BHL Recent Additions

iTunes Store: Top iTunes U Collections

Terms of Use

Disclaimer

The BHL Blog may contain the personal opinions of BHL users or affiliated staff and does not necessarily represent the official Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) position on these matters. Links to external Internet sites from BHL Web pages do not constitute BHL’s endorsement of the content of their Web sites or of their policies or products.

Cookies

We use cookies to support the internal functionality of the Websites. Information that we collect from cookies will not be used to create profiles of individual users and will only be used in aggregate form.

BHL also uses third-party vendors, such as Google Analytics and AddThis, which collect non-personally identifiable information and place cookies on your browser in order to make the BHL more interesting and useful to you.

You may set your browser to refuse cookies from any website that you visit. If you so choose, you may still gain access to most of the BHL Websites, but you may not be able to conduct certain types of transactions or take advantage of some of the interactive elements offered.